Taking Business Intelligence to the Next Level: Collaborative BI
•
0 likes•1,088 views
Self-service BI is usually an independent activity. But when individuals discover interesting information that they want to share, they need a centralized location to do that. So that by working together, new insights are possible. And that’s what collaboration is all about. In fact, one study (Aberdeen) found that companies that excel at collaborative BI experienced a 42 percent improvement in employment productivity because the users weren’t spending as much time searching for information and they saw a 30 percent improvement in business process efficiency. Furthermore, these companies saw BI adoption increase by 40 percent. As more people see the benefits of the solution, they become more likely to use it.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Taking Business Intelligence to the Next Level: Collaborative BI
Similar to Taking Business Intelligence to the Next Level: Collaborative BI (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Taking Business Intelligence to the Next Level: Collaborative BI
- 1. Taking Business Intelligence to the Next Level: Collaborative BI Stacia Misner blog.datainspirations.com @StaciaMisner
- 2. Agenda • BI and Collaboration Overview • Collaborative Decision Making Process • Collaborative BI Environment
- 4. Business Intelligence “With a single entry point, decision-makers quickly find, organize, automate, deliver, and aggregate all forms of information supporting the decision process…without IT assistance.” Business Intelligence Portals, TDWI, May 1, 1999
- 5. Traditional BI… Data Warehouse & BI Solutions ETL
- 6. Is Usually Not Self-Service BI Data Warehouse & BI Solutions ETL • Nightly IT • Weekly • Real time Supplemental data
- 7. Users Build Alternatives Data Warehouse & 80/20 rule BI Solutions ETL IT “Unfortunately, as many organizations have discovered the hard way, self-service BI is a myth and doesn’t translate well to reality. Although the concept is valid, implementation is misguided. The result is • Hard to repeat reporting chaos.” • Difficult to share —TDWI
- 8. Compromise Solution ETL Self- Service BI Fast & easy deployment
- 9. Collaboration and BI Employee Business process productivity efficiency • Share & discuss • Refresh data • Personalize Q… Q… Q… Speed of decision-making BI adoption
- 10. Methods of Collaboration • Simultaneous
- 11. Methods of Collaboration • Disjoined
- 12. Methods of Collaboration • Serialized
- 15. Step 1: Decide to Decide
- 16. Step 2: Diagnose the Problem
- 17. Step 3: Analyze and Act
- 18. Step 4: Assess Results
- 20. Delivering Business Intelligence • Document libraries • Dashboards
- 21. Connecting People User Profiles People: • Organizational view of relationships • Social network management • Subject matter expert identification
- 22. Connecting People My Site Web Sites People: • Status updates • Owned content • Blog posts
- 23. Connecting People My Site Web Sites People: • Newsfeed
- 24. Sharing Information Discussion Information: • Scorecard comments • Note Board • Blogs and wikis
- 25. Sharing Information Discoverability Information: • Tags • Ratings
- 26. Information Foraging • Information searching like food foraging o Peter Piroli and Stuart Card • Information “scent” o Aids estimation of usefulness of information • Information “snacking” o Encourages short visits for targeted answers
- 27. Finding Information Browsing Information: • Subject-Oriented Folders o Lack of certainty about where to find content o Potential for discovery of previously unknown resources • Thumbnail views o Visualization of content enhances browse experience
- 28. Finding Information Search Information: • Quality of results depends on quality of query • Keywords maximize discoverability
- 29. Finding Information Social Discovery Information: • Peer-to-peer recommendations o Direct suggestion o Newsfeeds
- 30. Start Collaborating! • Implement collaborative features incrementally • Teach collaborative decision-making skills, one group at a time • Encourage content development • Fit the process to user behavior, not to technology http://blog.datainspirations.com/collaborative-bi-resources/
Editor's Notes
- Business Intelligence is supposed to solve data access problems for us. And in particular – self-service BI was the big buzz word of 2010. But I remember when I started in BI, MANY years ago, that self-service was the holy grail.I was one of those IT people looking for a solution to the problem of getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and lo and behold I discovered Business intelligence. I remember well the self-service aspects that were the promise of BI at that time, such as you can see here in this quote from The Data Warehouse Institute in a journal article that same year:Read quoteSo, like many other IT professionals, I started building BI solutions…
- Let’s examine a typical diagram that shows the formal structures that are part of a traditional BI environment. We have our data source on the left, whether they’re relational sources or flat files or legacy system data. These are all the data sources capturing information about the business. Often there are many data sources, often in different formats. And these data sources are useful to users who have lots of questions, but for a variety of reasons, the data sources aren’t useful in their original form because the data is still raw. Asking questions of data requires summarization and filtering and applying calculations and various activities that adversely impact operational systems. So we move the data into a separate storage area – such as a data warehouse or a data mart or something that similar as part of a BI solution. To get the data into that new storage, we use Extract, Transform, and Load – or ETL – tools which allow us to clean up, reformat, and integrate the data. The restructured data is usually a dimensional model in the form of dimension and fact tables – and we might even create multidimensional databases called cubes. With cubes, we can automatically aggregate the data and then get faster query results. Without cubes, we can accomplish similar results by adding summary tables to the data warehouse, but that requires even more processes to make sure the summary and detail tables stay in sync. But regardless of the technical details behind the consolidation, the point is that you have created a separate source that is structured in a way that’s easier to query and that has faster query response times, and – importantly – is separate from the operational systems so that the read operations of BI queries don’t interfere with the write operations of business transactions. And from the restructured data, we develop reports – and dashboards – and scorecards - and all kinds of information can flow out of this environment. In this scenario, ideally our users are able to build their own reports…We can get a lot of benefits from this environment – the whole point of separating data from the source is to avoid impacting operation of the business while we’re running analytical queries that typically require summarization of large quantities of data. But the big problem with this approach is that it takes a lot of time and effort to build out this infrastructure. Now for certain types of information, that time and effort is well worth it. We need an official source of consolidated, cleansed, and certified for reporting up and out – up to corporate management and out to external stakeholders
- But unfortunately, traditional BI is not always self-service BI. I’ve seen one survey say that “Only 8.2 percent of the employees of a typical organization regularly use BI applications…” and another survey that puts the number higher at 15-20% - in my consulting practice, I find the percentage trends towards the lower end. So what’s happening? In many companies, users still rely on standard reports that have limited interactivity. The reports might have parameters that allow users to filter the reports, or they may allow the users to drill down into more detail but typically these reports are built to answer one question and not necessarily the next question that the user might have. And so when these new questions arise, users wind up going back to IT to get those reports. And another problem that we have with traditional BI is that the data warehouse is often designed with what I call the L to R solution. That is, IT focuses on the data sources and figures out from there how to build the design of the data warehouse or BI solution based on those sources… Rather than focusing on the users needs And moving from R to L for the design. I’ve seen this happen a lot in my consulting work over the years – I’m often surprised how many times solutions get built that got little to no user input when the whole point is to enable users to build their own reports. Sometimes Users find that the data is too old for whatever decision they need to make. In a BI solution, the data might be refreshed nightly or weekly. Some companies try to achieve real-time BI to address this problem, but there can be a lot of technical challenges to that. But even if with a real-time solution, there is likely data that the user has obtained from some other source that they want to analyze and so in spite of plans to grow a data warehouse organically, and introduce new data sources and manage new requirements periodically, you can probably never keep up with the analysis needs and data requirements of the user community. And that’s not to mention the other problems that we have as barriers to self-service such as the structure of the data itself and the tools that users have available.
- So what happens is – users do an end run around the BI solution. They start looking outside the sanctioned sources because they need to get information to make decisions. They’ll get information from wherever they can find it internally – and they’ll get it from external business partners, and maybe they’ll find some data on industry trends that they can download from an Internet site, so they’ll wind up manually compiling a lot of data, The bottom line is that the data they need for decision-making on a day-to-day basis is not getting integrated into the corporate system. As I already pointed out, in some cases, never will be – depending on what that information is. So they either get what they need from the corporate system and copy it into some other solution where they reformat it, or they ignore it entirely, choosing instead to build their own applications in spreadsheets and personal database applications. So in this scenario, we often find that the 80/20 rule applies, where 80 percent of the time is spent gathering and integrating data and reformatting it in some way and only 20 percent of the time is actually spent performing analysis. So not only are these unmanaged solutions proliferating around the organization, but we run into problems with being able to repeat the process anytime we get fresh data. And the solution is often hard to share. It can be difficult to send really large workbooks through the email system whether the files are 5 mb or 100s of megabytes. Regardless of these difficulties, users find the value of the information is worth the pain – but now there’s a whole underground system that has no corporate oversight but contributes to a lot of important decision-making in the organization. A few years back – The Data Warehouse Institute had this to say about self-service BI: “Unfortunately, as many organizations have discovered the hard way, self-service BI is a myth and doesn’t translate well to reality. Although the concept is valid, implementation is misguided. The result is reporting chaos.” And not much has changed since then. I think myth is too strong a word these days because there are a lot of organizations that have managed to empower users with BI. But those organizations are unfortunately the exception, and not the rule.
- With all that doom and gloom, does that mean that self-service BI will never be a reality? My answer is no – I don’t think so. I think that the confluence of changes over the last decade position us for a positive outlook. Just consider the difference in the capabilities of a desktop computer today versus ten years ago. And we have access to more data in more formats in greater volumes than ever before. We also have newer technologies to leverage that simplify the user experience. The key is to be clear about the problem that you’re trying to solve. And while I think self-service BI is poised to become a reality, I don’t think it is a replacement for the BI systems that have been our focus in the past. Instead, I think we compromise and create complementary systems. There is a place for the structured data warehouse and standardized solutions that IT builds and maintains for quick consumption of historical data by a large community of users. But IT professionals should also prepare to support a new generation of self-service BI tools that can help avoid the problems that I’ve described. So ideally we need to develop a system that incorporates the self service BI technology as part of the overall solution. We need to recognize that some data never WILL be part of the data warehouse but we need a technology that makes it easy to integrate with the information that we’ve spent a lot of time and money to build so that people can also use that information with data that has short-term but immediate value. When looking at deploying a Self Service BI technology, we don’t want another solution that’s going to take a lot of time to roll out and just compound the problem that we already have. And we want a solution that can be up and running quickly and one that makes it easy to change in the future as information needs change. We need to make sure that the technology is intuitive and allows users to work with data the way they’re already used to thinking about it – in a way, the tool needs to facilitate the R to L approach that I recommend that IT professionals take when designing a traditional BI solution.
- Self-service BI is usually an independent activity. But when individuals discover interesting information that they want to share They need a centralized location to do that So that by working together, new insights are possible. And that’s what collaboration is all about. In fact, one study (Aberdeen) found that companies that excel at collaborative BI experienced a 42 percent improvement in employment productivity because the users weren’t spending as much time searching for information and they saw a 30 % improvement in business process efficiency. Furthermore, these companies saw Bi adoption increase by 40 percent. As more people see the benefits of the solution, they become more likely to use it. And 2/3 of these best-in-class companies were able to use their BI solution to make decisions within a day. http://esj.com/articles/2009/03/25/collaborative-bi-enhances-customer-responsiveness.aspx Users need the ability not only to post information to a central location, but they also need to be able to share and discuss the information and insights. Maybe come up with an action plan and assign tasks – maybe to turn around a negative trend or to keep a positive trend moving in the right direction. And then when the information is centralized like this, there needs to be a way to refresh the data too – so that users don’t have to start from scratch each time the data changes. And there should be a way to personalize the information, so that other users can leverage work initiated by the original author. Just providing a centralized location for BI isn’t enough for successful collaboration. It’s important to define the rules of engagement for everyone that participates so that data is used efficiently and a culture of collaboration needs to be established and nurtured. One way that successful companies encourage collaboration is through the use of dashboards and portals that allow people to share not just the reports they created but also their insights. The collaborative solution should have a way to trigger the delivery of information to the audience that would find it relevant. … Keep in mind that this is not just about implementing an enabling technology but also about helping change the way that they interact with information and each other, which will not happen overnight.
- A friend of mine, Donald Farmer – who is now a product advocate with Qliktech – came up with a way to describe collaborative methods that has really stuck with me. I’ve seen some of these methods work better than others, depending on the nature of the problem to solve, the personality types of the people involved in the collaborative effort, and the technology available. First, there is simultaneous collaboration, which you can think of as the type of collaboration that occurs when everyone is in the same place – either physically in the same meeting room or virtually through web conferencing. Everyone in the room or participating in the online conference call typically views the same document. Collaboration can mean exploring a report together during a meeting, perhaps with one person displaying data withMicrosoft Power View and responding to requests from the group to highlight and filter data during a discussion, right from within a PowerPoint presentation, that helps everyone develop deeper insight into the nature of a situation. Maybe one designated person captures the suggestions made by the group in a document,orremote participants make edits concurrently in the same document. And it’s very typical for the meeting’s discussions to require follow-up from various individuals, so a task list can be created during the meeting and tracked in a central location.
- Another method of collaboration is described asDisjoined. Although information might be managed in a central location, people work with the information independently of one another. If changes need to be made, there might be a check-in and check-out process to prevent the proliferation of multiple copies that get out of sync. In this type of collaboration, there might also be a way to add comments that are visible to others who later work with the same information. And of course, others are free to make their own changes to the information and toAdd comments. This technique works well when co-works are not in the same place at the same time. Individuals can sometimes be more thoughtful about the meaning behind the data if they have some time alone with it, rather than be put on the spot during a meeting. Some users might like the ability to explore the data more fully on their own. For example, they could take an existing PowerPivot workbook that’s been published to SharePoint and use that as a starting point for additional analysis which they then save separately and perhaps combine with other information, either through a new dashboard at one end of the spectrum, or just through a series of comments and links posted in a blog or wiki entry at the other end of the spectrum.
- Then the third collaboration is aSerialized approach.In its simplest form, this can be the dissemination of information through email, moving from one person to another where commentary accumulates in a single email thread and perhaps adjustments made to an attached document, although ideally the email references content that is stored and updated in a central location so that people don’t wind up working with the wrong version. Although many people rely heavily on email, it can sometimes be challenging to reconstruct a series of discussions and collaborative efforts through email alone.Another option might be to use a predefined, automated workflow within SharePoint that not only stores the relevant content but facilitates the commenting process and other types of collaborative features. As I mentioned earlier, some methods work better than others - but that doesn’t mean that any one of these methods is superior to others – and it really depends more on the culture of collaboration of the people involved. You might use a combination of methods to achieve your goals, but the bottom line is that eliminate barriers to collaboration rather than try to enforce a specific approach.
- https://www.mercurymagazines.com/pdf/NCIBMBI5.pdfMost BI projects focus on getting information out to the business users but fail to close the loop – they don’t connect actions to business outcome and they don’t capture lessons learned or best practices for future decisions.A couple of years ago, Gartner published some research notes by Rita Sallam who I saw speak with Donald Farmer at an industry conference – and this idea of the collaborative decision making process that I heard them discuss really got the wheels turning for me about what was possible. In a nutshell, Collaborative decision making allows employees to:recognize when a problem… or opportunity exists that requires some type of decision. It’s typically not something expected for which a business process is already in place, such as a drop in inventory that requires replenishment. So then the next step is to do some investigation to diagnose the root cause of the problem and that might require exploratory analysis, finding relevant information to provide more context for the problem at hand and even finding expertise of others who have tackled this type of problem before or can help brainstorm and come up with alternative approaches. Ultimately, the group comes to a decision on the next steps to be taken, and can assign responsibilities to one or more members of the group as needed.And importantly, once the outcome of those action items are known, the results should be recorded and discussed with the group, noting whether the expected outcome was achieved or not. As a consequence, the lessons learned from this cycle of collaborative decision making can introduce new metrics that require ongoing monitoring and the cycle begins anew.In short, Collaborative decision making relies on business intelligence to highlight problems or opportunities, uses collaboration and social networking to connect people, information, and their ideas, and incorporates workflow to facilitate a review process or prescribed sequence of steps for decision-making. Now I should point out that this is the IDEAL process and although many vendors might be trying to move their product offerings in a direction that better support this process , to MY knowledge none of them automate this process. And I would like to emphasize that this is as much about process as it is about technology. If moving from your current decision making process to a more collaborative decision making process involves significant change, then you’ll need to consider taking small, incremental steps towards change. That said, much of what Gartner describes as necessary to the collaborative decision making process is available through features you can easily implement by using built-in features of Microsoft SharePoint.
- Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps and how they might be implemented in SharePoint.The first step is to Decide to decideWe may use a variety of mechanisms to monitor the current state of operations or trends. A dashboard is a popular way to get this information, but we could just as easily use alerts, reports, or other means to become aware of potential problems requiring some sort of action. In this case, we see that although we have one sales channel significantly higher than other channels over time, there is a significant drop off from one year to the next and the downward trend is continuing. This is the sort of information from our business intelligence that requires a decision to intervene and either discover and resolve the problem causing the downward trend or perhaps find a way to boost sales in other channels.
- Step 2 of the diagnostic process is to Diagnose problemOne way that we can do this is to use our BI tools to perform ad hoc analysis and drill into the details and examine the data from a variety of perspectives. PerformancePoint analytic charts and grids give us an easy way to do this from within the browser, without opening up other tools. We can filter and drill and ultimately get to the bottom 3 products to assess the drop in sales over time. There are of course other tools supporting interactive data visualization and exploration – Power View – and also data mining that could surface patterns that we might not see through ad hoc analysis. For disjoined collaboration we can leave notes for others to invite a collaborative effort. Or we can participate in a team discussion that we and others can review later without having to go dig through emails to find what people have committed to doing or contributed to a discussion on a topic.We can also go looking for people by browsing an organizational chart or by using a keyword search. We can then review self-published information about areas of expertise to find people who are likely able to help us uncover the root cause of our problem. We can set up meetings, review documents together or individually, and continue the analysis process.
- The third step is Analyze, and act. During this period, we might develop one or more hypotheses.We can use tools like PowerPivot or even Excel to perform what-if analysis, combining actual data with estimates and assessing the results of increasing sales or reducing costs. We can even store the results of our brainstorming in this way as alternate versions of reports in a specially designated area of our site. In addition, we can create assignments which we can view on the SharePoint site so we can keep track of where we are and who is responsible for which action item.
- The most neglected step is to Assess results.If some action was taken, we need to keep reviewing the metrics for the problem area we identified, perhaps even by setting up new dashboards and reporting mechanisms. The bottom line is we need to see what happens as a result of our decision. And of course this result that we’re watching becomes the new input for another round of collaborative decision making should something go amiss while we’re monitoring it. But we’re not done there, we should document the process, including both the expected and actual outcomes. One way to do this is to use Wiki pages to describe the history and Assuming some action was taken, need to monitor what happened as a result of that action Eventually successful decision patterns should emerge
- So now that you have a general idea of how BI and collaboration can work together, and how the collaborative decision-making process might work in a SharePoint environment, let’s take a closer look at some of the necessary elements that make collaboration easier.
- SharePoint allows you to share business intelligence in a number of ways.The simplest way is to store reports in document libraries – reports can be Excel or PowerPivot workbooks, Reporting Services reports including standard and Power View reports.However, putting information into context is more easily done when you combine reports in whatever form into composite form as a dashboard. To start, dashboards can be set up to present information about important metrics to monitor. Dashboards – as I mentioned earlier – should make it easy to see trends and outliers that suggest further investigation might be required and action taken. Part of the process of collaborative decision making is the gathering of information. One of the things you can do is set up a subsite for collecting and organizing information related to a particular decision. A dashboard page is very useful for bringing together items of related information. Although I see the primary purpose of a dashboard as a succinct visual overview of business processes that you’re monitoring, I also think that it can be useful for targeted purposes such as the information gathering phase of the decision making process. You can bring together not only pieces of reports that highlight the problem, but it’s a way to consolidate various bits of related information and show the current status of discussions and tasks so that you can have one-stop shopping if you will for everything that’s relevant.
- An important aspect of a collaborative BI environment is How to find people who can help you.An easy way to do this with SharePoint is to enable User Profiles. You can synchronize user profiles with your network’s active directory and other business systems that provide supplemental information about each user. Although there are many benefits associated with implementing User Profiles, for collaboration purposes, we useUser profiles to understand where others fit within the hierarchical structure of the organization. In a large organization or for new employees in a smaller organization, this can be helpful to understand the Create social networks where we can identify people who share common organizational or workgroup goals or defined interests. Within the social network, we can stay on top of what’s happening through what others are sharing in a less formal way – and jump into a conversation that we can contribute to or be made aware of information that we might not otherwise have access to if we were solely depending on email or monitoring network shares or Web folders for new files. Also, user profiles can capture information about co-workers that can be relevant when we’re using the People Search in SharePoint to locate people who might be able to help on a given topic. This information is more likely to be contributed by individual users themselves rather than come from business systems.
- A key piece of social network management Is the implementation of My Site Web sites which makes User Profiles so useful. One of the transitions we see in the development of content on the Web is also an important transition for organizational content. What I mean by that is that the value of My Site Web sites increases when more people publish information. Even information as relatively minor – in the grand scheme – as a status update can start a conversation that winds up leading to new or improved relationships as you get to know co-workers better. Then there’s content that a user creates and you can see it as a collection of items as long as you have the right permissions. This is another way of finding content that might be helpful to the decision-making process – by exploring people in the organization with the expertise you need and then seeing what type of content they are sharing.And in another sort of way, the entry of blog posts can also identify someone as a subject matter expert which can be found through the search mechanism. A user can tag a post and the resulting tag cloud can surface the type of content in which that user specializes. And of course blog posts are a great way to document lessons learned about the collaborative decision-making process in general as well as specific to areas in which the user participates. This type of feedback on what worked and what didn’t for earlier decision-making exercises is incredibly useful, but it takes a recognition of that usefulness and a willingness to take the time to document the process to make it happen.
- A key piece of social network management Is the implementation of My Site Web sites which makes User Profiles so useful. One of the transitions we see in the development of content on the Web is also an important transition for organizational content. What I mean by that is that the value of My Site Web sites increases when more people publish information. One option is to use the My Networks page to monitor people, interests, and activities that you’re tracking. For example, you can monitor activity by tag – basically you identify your interests and your newsfeeds includes those items.You can also see status updates for colleagues you’re following or see notes that they’ve posted.
- Part of the process of collaborative decision making is the gathering of information. One of the things you can do is set up a subsite for collecting and organizing information related to a particular decision. An important aspect of the collaboration process is commenting. You can add comments to scorecards as one option, but those comments are limited to specific cells of a scorecard and require you to open up each cell’s comments individually. Another option is to use the noteboard on the dashboard or web page or individual document to collect comments. You can see the series of comments associated with any of these object types.Other ways that you can collaborate include commenting on blog posts or wiki entries. You can think of a blog as a subject-oriented threaded conversation beginning with the main idea posted by the author and a series of comments following. With a wiki page, the original idea can be enhanced and modified over time by multiple people, but version control allows you to preserve each state from the original to the current when necessary.
- Another aspect of sharing that’s important for a collaborative environment is taking steps to make sure other people can more easily find information you post or find yourself.Tags are keywords that User-generated, and not part of a formal taxonomy. Anyone can add a tag, just by typing – or selecting from a set of existing tags, but only users with Manage Social Data permission can delete a tag. The My Site Web includes a tag cloud web part – that you can filter… If you include a tag in your profile, you can get notified when a Web page gets tagged with that infoPersonal note (don’t read….): Administrator can maintain list of URLs to block tagging on a site or subsite to protect content (see privacy and security implications of social tagging in SharePoint 2010)You can also use ratings to help people assess information in a SharePoint list, a document library, or even individual Web pages. The idea is that when you have a lot of content available, users can provide feedback not only to other users about content that they find helpful, but this is also good as feedback to report developers to weed out reports that are deemed less helpful by the users.
- SEE THIS: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040802.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foragingThere’s an interesting theory that have been developed to explain how people look for information – it’s called Information Foraging. I first heard about this from Donald Farmer at yet another talk he did that inspired me to think about other ways to design collaborative environments. This theory has its roots in the food foraging theories developed by ecologists and anthropologists and is based on the idea that maximum energy gets expended by a predator where prey is most likely to be found and in particular where the prey worth pursuing is likely to be found.Two guys from Palo Alto Research Center – P & C – took that theory in the early 90s and adapted it to the hunt for information. That is, they decided that search patterns were very similar to food foraging. Since then, there has been a lot of work to model searching, and of course apply this to computing. Information scentThe most important concept in the information foraging theory is "information scent”. As animals rely on scents to indicate the chances of finding prey in current area and guide them to other promising patches, so do humans rely on various cues in the information environment to get similar answers. Human users estimate how much useful information they are likely to get on a given path, and after seeking information compare the actual outcome with their predictions. When the information scent stops getting stronger (i.e., when users no longer expect to find useful additional information), the users move to a different information source.Information snackingSome tendencies in the behaviour of web users are easily understood from the information foraging theory standpoint. On the Web, each site is a patch and information is the prey. Leaving a site is easy, but finding good sites has not always been as easy. Advanced search engines have changed this fact by reliably providing relevant links, altering the foraging strategies of the users. When users expect that sites with lots of information are easy to find, they have less incentive to stay in one place. The growing availability of broadband connections may have a similar effect: always-on connections encourage "information snacking", short online visits to get specific answers. As you create a collaborative environment, think about how you store information and how you add metadata, tags, ratings, and so on to provide the right information scent.
- So assuming that over time, information has been accumulating in your collaborative environment. What are the main ways that people are going to go about finding that information? One option is to browse.The simplest way to set up content to support browsing is to take Subject-oriented approach.This allows people to assess available content, but having a list of links not always helpful.You really have to click through each to find out what a report is. That’s why PowerPivot workbooks and Power View reports provide a visual display in the document library known as the PowerPivot Gallery. If you can produce reports in PowerPivot, these reports lend themselves well to the browsing approach to finding information.
- Another way to find information is to do a search.But the user has to know the right words to use in a searchAnd the authors of reports need to enhance reports with the right keywords to make sure they can be found.
- In a collaborative environment, social discovery provides yet another way to find information.Social discovery relies on commendations among peers. Simply put, you ask someonewho knows and get their suggestions. You can post a request through status updates or a note board, or as you’re browsing user profiles, you can explore their content page which is an implicit type of suggestion.Newsfeeds are another way to surface content but you have to be paying attention. A newsfeed can highlights popular content. You can always configure the types of activities you want to see here. If there’s a lot of activity appearing in your newsfeed, it can be easy to lose sight of important information signaling a change that you’re trying to monitor. As one librarian put it, “We can have it all with search— search for seekers who know what they want, social for seekers who want to listen and engage, and browsing for seekers who wish to meander and let the collection speak for itself.” Laura Larsell
- So now how do you get started?Obviously the processes and collaboration tools I discussed in today’s presentation have a dependency on SharePoint. If you don’t currently have a SharePoint implementation, then consider these features to be a benchmark against which you can measure to which a vendor you’re considering is delivering capabilities and prioritize the ones that you think can provide the most value to your users. Where I mention SharePoint in the subsequent step, think creatively how you can use the tools that you have in similar ways. And if you DO have a SharePoint implementation, you might feel a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities if you’re not already using these features. So take a step back and think about taking an incremental approach, prioritizing the features that deliver the most value.Because collaboration is as much about people and process as it is about technology, be sure to allocate time to teach users how to incorporate collaboration tools into their decision-making skills. Start with a small, motivated group to work through the process a few times on small projects. Then use that team to mentor others through the process. An important way to support the collaboration process is to start getting knowledge collected in the SharePoint environment. One useful technique is to encourage people to use blog posts or other online tracking mechanisms as a way to answer questions they receive in email in depth and then send the response not only to the person asking the question but also directly to a SharePoint blog. Obviously that’s not applicable to every email, but where questions relate to corporate or department processes and have value to a broader audience now or to future employees, it makes sense to start building up that body of knowledge. SharePoint makes it easy to add blog posts by sending an email or from a Word document, so the barrier to getting this task done is low.Also bear in mind that people are not going to embrace collaborative decision making if they feel like the technology is helping them get the job done rather than impeding them.If you’re interested in learning more about collaborative BI, I’ve set up a page on my Web site where I’ve included links to some of the resources that I have found helpful in learning about collaborative BI and the collaborative features in SharePoint 2010 in particular. I’ll be updating this page from time to time, beginning with links to a blog series in which I’ll walk through in more detail the items that I’ve discussed in today’s presentation to help you visualize the benefits, usage, and implementation more clearly. That’s it for our time today – thanks so much for joining me. And now if there are any questions, I’ll be happy to try to answer them.